he
[Anglican] principle [of Antiquity] is self-destructive." "When a man
takes up this _Via Media_, he is a mere _doctrinaire_;" he is like
those, "who, in some matter of business, start up to suggest their
own little crotchet, and are ever measuring mountains with a pocket
ruler, or improving the planetary courses." "The _Via Media_ has
slept in libraries; it is a substitute of infancy for manhood."

It is plain, then, that at the end of 1835 or beginning of 1836, I
had the whole state of the question before me, on which, to my mind,
the decision between the Churches depended. It is observable that the
question of the position of the Pope, whether as the centre of unity,
or as the source of jurisdiction, did not come into my thoughts at
all; nor did it, I think I may say, to the end. I doubt whether I
ever distinctly held any of his powers to be _de jure divino_, while
I was in the Anglican Church;--not that I saw any difficulty in the
doctrine; not that, together with the story of St. Leo, of which I
shall speak by and by, the idea of his infallibility did not cross my
mind, for it did--but after all, in my view the controversy did not
turn upon it; it turned upon the Faith and the Church. This was my
issue of the controversy from the beginning to the end. There was a
contrariety of claims between the Roman and Anglican religions, and
the history of my conversion is simply the process of working it out
to a solution. In 1838 I illustrated it by the contrast presented to
us between the Madonna and Child, and a Calvary. I said that the
peculiarity of the Anglican theology was this--that it "supposed the
Truth to be entirely objective and detached, not" (as the Roman)
"lying hid in the bosom of the Church as if one with her, clinging
to and (as it were) lost her embrace, but as being sole and
unapproachable, as on the Cross or at the Resurrection, with the
Church close by, but in the background."

As I viewed the controversy in 1836 and 1838, so I viewed it in 1840
and 1841. In the _British Critic_ of January 1840, after gradually
investigating how the matter lies between the Churches by means of a
dialogue, I end thus: "It would seem, that, in the above discussion,
each disputant has a strong point: our strong point is the argument
from Primitiveness, that of Romanists from Universality. It is a
fact, however it is to be accounted for, that Rome has added to the
Creed; and it is a fact, however we justify ourselves, t